1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to interoperable web sites and e-commerce on computer networks, and more particularly to methods and devices that allow a user to drag items from web pages displayed in browser windows and to drop the items in the application window of a virtual world, where the drag and drop action is a metaphor for the user's purchase or acquisition of the item represented by an image icon.
2. Background Information
Virtual shopping environments currently exist on the Internet. Examples of virtual shopping environments include e-commerce web sites where users/purchasers and sellers buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. Users navigate the Internet to different e-commerce web sites using network browsers and search through the virtual inventory of the web site to find what they want to buy or learn more about. Many sellers do not actually have the items being auctioned or offered for sale in stock. In any event, the transactions are concluded by linking to a money transfer or payment web site or private checkout system. Real money is then charged to the user/purchaser and real products are then physically delivered.
Virtual worlds are a genre of online community that often take the form of a computer-based simulated environment, through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. Virtual worlds are intended for their users to inhabit and interact and have become synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others graphically. These avatars are usually depicted as textual, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional graphical representations, although other forms are possible. Most virtual worlds allow for multiple users.
One such virtual world is “Second Life”. Second Life is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab of San Francisco, Calif. (www.lindenlab.com) that launched in June 2003 and is accessible via the Internet. Second Life enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world (referred to as “the grid”).
In this virtual world, users virtually navigate around the world and have the ability to find and purchase virtual goods that can be added to their avatar's inventory. Examples of items that can be bought are clothes to dress the avatar, furnishings for the avatar's virtual home or business, and cars. Attractive new bodies can also be purchased for a price. Virtual money, such as Linden Dollars ($L), is used to buy the virtual goods. No actual or tangible thing is physically delivered. However, if a user has not earned and banked enough virtual money in the virtual world, the user can buy in, like chips in a poker game, using real money. Again, PayPal is a common way to buy virtual money like Linden dollars.
In 2008, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, of Armonk, N.Y.) and Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, demonstrated virtual world interoperability by teleporting avatars between Second Life and an entirely different Metaverse running on an OpenSim network server. A Metaverse is a virtual world, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. The term “Metaverse” is most typically used to describe a virtual reality-based, 3D successor to the Internet.
This demonstration was a significant development, because it showed online virtual worlds could stop operating as closed environments and let avatars travel between metaverses. That requires a high level of interoperability between not only the respective virtual world servers, but also the user operating system displaying the respective virtual worlds in their corresponding display windows.
As of the beginning of 2010, there is a scarcity of standards for interoperability amongst competing virtual worlds. Additionally, the many e-commerce web sites do not have the ability to interoperate with other e-commerce web sites and servers, except payment facilitators. However, e-commerce web sites desire the ability to interoperate with other e-commerce web sites and servers and are beginning to effectuate these changes.
For example, Google (Google Inc.; an Internet search engine) has developed an operating system for a mobile telephone with T-Mobile (a mobile telephone provider, owned by Deutsche Telekom). An operating system developed by Google, known as the “Android” operating system found on T-Mobile's “G1 Smartphone” mobile telephone, allows users to jump between “Google Maps”, “G-Mail”, and other Google servers.